Potential
by Procrastinator-starting2moro
Summary: ‘Boredom is a sign of unused potential.’ James reflects on Snape’s worst memory, realizing, in a bizarre sense, his actions towards Snape had been similar to a Death Eater’s. Drabble.


**Disclaimer: **I own nothing.

**A/N:** Angst coming at you! Run! Run away while you can!

I swear an update on You Give Me Heart Palpitations is coming soon!

Anyway,****I wrote this months ago for a challenge where the story had to start with "Had I but known…" with the prompt of 'Boredom is a sign of unused potential'. Dark thoughts on Snape's memory. A drabble about the point where James changed for Lily.

Thanks to Moony—I mean, _Anna_, for beta-ing.

**Potential**

Had I but known hanging Severus Snape upside-down in the air, displaying his skinny, pallid legs and grey underpants to all and sundry, would delay Lily Evans finally accepting to go out with me, while making me feel a reverberating sense of inhumanity; then I wouldn't have done it.

Or maybe I would have.

At least, if you'd asked to publicly humiliate Snape a week after that particular event, I would have answered with a guffaw accompanied with a certain yes.

But after what I've recently seen…I wish I'd never done it. In fact, even the slightest inkling of wanting someone to ascend in the air, to hang like _that_…it forces my blood to run cold.

'Levicorpus' was the spell I'd used. It was a particular curse that had carried a vogue at the time; passed on from student to student. I heard a Slytherin had invented the spell. Someone even suggested Snape of all people. No Slytherin could have created it. I refused to believe it...

Until I witnessed it used by the Death Eaters. I had seen them do it with my very eyes.

It was an attack at Hogsmeade. It was so close to the safe, protected Hogwarts castle it was frightening. The arrival of Voldermort's followers was coupled by the familiar sound of screaming. It's not nice to know that for a boy of seventeen years an utter long piercing cry is a common sound to hear. Everyone is used to the calls of distress. We've had to, because it's dark times.

They appeared with their usual hooded cloaks and I felt the familiar rush of anger inside me. They were cowards. They hid their shameful faces behind those cloaks of iniquity. There have been countless number of times I have wanted to rip of those hoods and expose them for what they really are: heartless monsters. Yet…they had done what _I_ did.

It happened so quickly that I felt all breath escape me. The Muggleborns were floating. When you think of floating, you imagine grace and poise.

It was the most disturbing thing I'd ever seen in my life.

The Muggleborns were the puppets. The Death Eaters were the puppeteers. We were the unwanted audience. The world was their stage.

I could barely witness the unnatural positions they were forced into. They looked so limp and lifeless, anguish stricken across their faces; the shrieking of help rung so shrilly in my ears I felt them bleed.

Managing to escape the scene, I struggled my way back to the shelter of Hogwarts and fell to my knees. Involuntarily, flashes of those Muggleborn students filled my brain like some sort of twisted picture slideshow and I felt everything inside my stomach make its way up. I ended up vomiting on the grass.

What had the Death Eaters done it out of? What was the motive of -to some extent- lynching those Muggleborns in the air?

Was the answer to relieve boredom?

What had my motive been for hanging Snape from the air?

Possibly to relieve boredom, yet again?

Sirius' boredom had driven me to cruelty to Snape. But Sirius was not to blame wholly, merely my stupidity for driving me to my actions. Sirius and I were both young, naive and irrational.

'Boredom is a sign of unused potential', that was the saying I had heard. Vaguely recalling, I think my mother had once spoken it to me in the summer holidays whilst I complained monotony, lying on a sun lounger in the garden. This was before I had discovered Sirius and before Sirius had discovered he could leave his ghastly parents and invade -in the most charmingly lovable way – my house.

Boredom is a sign of unused potential…

Potential. The word means to be capable of being but not yet in existence. Having possibility, capability, or power.

Potential sounds so admirable. When you have potential as a person, it's normally associated with having the possibility to be somewhat great; to be _something_.

If having potential sounded so admirable, why was it so unused? Why was it so unused through the signs of boredom?

Maybe because when that potential is released, it's not something you want anyone, including yourself, to see.

I had acted like a Death Eater - not deliberately, of course, but I had still carried it out. Snape had dangled there, defenceless, by my whim. He was under my control, just like those Death Eaters were in control of those Muggleborns. I had power.

To some extent and outlandish idea, I had been like Voldemort.

Instead of screams, I had received laughter by my adjoining classmates. They had cheered me on. I was looked up to. People admired me for what I did.

At that brief moment, had I the potential to be a Death Eater?

Of course, I don't have the same beliefs of executing Muggles or Muggleborns, neither would I exclude anyone because of the amount of wizarding blood inside them; more blood or less. I don't find sadistic pleasure or fascination in the dirty, sordid Dark Arts Voldemort and his followers practise and carry out. In reality, I loathe the Dark Arts and anyone who finds any particular interest in them.

However, I had the hatred and intensity in me, enough to overturn Snape and drape him in the air; like a dead mouse from a cat's paw.

I finally realised why Remus hadn't laughed like the others that day by the Great Lake when Snape was in mid air; why he had stared on.

It hadn't been funny.

It wasn't in any way humorous.

I just wish Remus had told me, voiced his thoughts that what I was doing was wrong.

I finally discovered why Lily had held such a shocking, glazed look, yelling furiously at me before turning on her heel.

I had made her _sick_.

I had made _myself_ sick.

Yes, boredom is a sign of unused potential.

Although sometimes, that potential is locked away for a reason.


End file.
